The reason that I was getting all those strange errors, see both posts below was that the only wsdl that counts is the one generated by XFire on the fly so if you change a copy of it locally no matter how many times you redeploy, stand on your head, which way you hold your mouth, etc, etc you are stuck addressing your service via that wsdl and only that wsdl. Needs to be put in the tutorials. Taken me 3 days to figure that out, too much previous experience and thinking it had to be complicated.
Jim 🙂